Everyday water insecurity in decentralized water systems: Emotions, coping, and justice across hydrosocial territories in Southern Chile

This study examines how rural households in southern Chile navigate water insecurity under the looming climate stress and industrial forestry. Drawing on an abductive thematic analysis of interviews conducted in 2022, we conceptualize insecurity as a multitemporal regime of uncertainty that jeopardizes the ontological security of daily life. We document how hydrosocial encirclement by plantations produces visible water exclusion, where water remains physically observable but institutionally inaccessible. Analytically, we mapped affective coping landscapes and identified pragmatic acceptance as the dominant strategy, structured by grueling, embodied labor and physical fatigue. This coexists with defensive cynicism, through which resignation shields households from pervasive institutional unreliability, and radical engagement, where Mapuche communities wrestle with bureaucratic procedures while nurturing spiritual repertoires of resistance. Our findings challenge touted technocratic fixes, showing how they can devolve into a nuisance system of patch provision that privatizes risk and responsibility. Against catchall narratives of adaptation, we call for governance reforms that supersede volumetric coverage as the primary metric and instead bolster reliability, devise legal subsistence corridors, and recognize diverse hydrosocial relational worlds. The article contributes to political ecology through an account of how emotional, infrastructural, and territorial dynamics co-produce rural survival.